Body Snatchers from Beneath the Earth
by SheliakBob
Summary: Dracula survives his daughter's attempt to destroy him in "Dracula's Daughter" with the help of The Mole People and must go on a subterranean odyssey to return to his native Transylvania.


**BODY SNATCHERS FROM BENEATH THE EARTH**

"I will finally be free of him, Sandor!"

"How can you be sure of that, Mistress?"

"We will claim the body, take it to the countryside, exorcise it, burn it, and leave it for the sun to shine on. He won't come back from that, Sandor! Not even _He_ could come back from that."

The tiniest shadow of doubt crept into her voice.

"As you say, Mistress."

There was a hint of sardonic condescension in his.

The ring on Countess Marya Zaleska's finger, a great dark opal that was a gift from her father, flickered with a strange, blood-red light. The Countess used the ring as a focus to boost her hypnotic powers when she hunted. She knew that the ring was steeped in dark sorcery and the blackest of magics. What she did not know was that her father had infused the gem with a portion of his essence, a splinter of his soul. It aided in hypnotizing prey because it brought his own power, the dark will of Dracula, in to supplement his daughter's weaker gifts. It was the source of the dark urges, waking dreams, and uncontrollable compulsions that kept her subject to his will. No matter how fiercely she fought against it, she could always feel his presence hovering over her, his will pressing down against her own. The ring allowed Dracula to see and hear everything she did, whenever he wished to do so.

Therefore, despite the fact that his body lie lifeless and cold in a rural English police station, with a stake driven through his heart, Count Dracula was completely aware of his daughter's plans. And he was not pleased.

His daughter knew more than most would-be vampire killers. Born a daughter to the dead and a hundred and fifty years as a blood-drinking vampire herself, her knowledge of the true lore of the Nosferatu was formidable. Therefore, the threat she posed to his existence was more grave than most. She was far more dangerous to him than the eminently educated Van Helsing could ever be.

However, he had planned for such a peril, and now his will stirred to set his plans in motion.

Deep beneath the Earth there are dark worlds undreamt of, worlds untouched by sunlight where cold, inhuman minds hold sway.

In a cavern festooned with the webs of albino spiders, amid a forest of stalagmites, something evil came to life. There was a pool of water with an absolutely still surface, eternally unrippled and clear as crystal, it appeared as a sheet of glass laid over black, porous stone. Inside that pool, something like a fire began to burn. The still waters began to swirl, then to boil. Sheets of vapor rose like steam from the surface. A wavering green light glowed upwards through the mist, flickering like a fire, but with absolutely no sound or heat.

Things lived in the darkness of the cavern, grotesque inhuman things with terrible claws. These things shuffled nearer, gathered around the glowing pool. A thrumming sound that might have been chanting, too deep for human ears, filled the cavern.

A face appeared inside the column of mist, looking very much as if film was being projected onto a cloud of fog. At first the face was a blurry oval with darkly shadowed eyes. Then the features began to become clear. A high forehead with a black widow's peak, deep dark eyes with only a glitter visible inside the blackness, a long aquiline nose and full lips. Those lips formed a sly, cruel smile and seemed to grow almost solid. The face of Count Dracula looked down upon the groveling shadows, looked down and spoke.

"My friends," intoned a deep melodic voice, "The time has come. Our bargain is to be completed. Come to me. Let it be as it was planned long ages ago. Fulfill your promise… old friends. Your service shall be rewarded."

Excitement stirred among the black shapes gathered in the cave. Slit-like mouths chattered in infrasound chorus. Great unblinking eyes turned upward, toward a world that did not even suspect that they existed. The monsters of the deepest dark began to shuffle, began to rise!

In a dirt-floored holding room at the Whitby police station, the earth heaved and shuddered. Two distinct trails of broken earth, like the wakes of slow moving boats gouged upwards from the ground, appeared. They churned toward two plain wooden coffins stored in that dark room until the experts from Scotland Yard could come to examine the contents. Inside were the bodies of two men, both murdered, one with a broken neck and the other with a wooden stake pounded through his heart.

The men staffing the station watched the churning dirt creep across the floor, white faces clustered in the small window of the door. Their eyes widened, they began to shake, and with unsteady hands, they closed the shutter over that window. As they turned away from the door, ignoring the scraping, shuffling sounds that came from within, they resolved not to pay any attention to what was going on inside that locked room. Their orders were to lock up the evidence and allow no one through that door until the experts arrived. They would do that, and no more.

Inside, one of the trails circled to reach the head of the coffin holding the body of the madman with the broken neck. A pair of claws broke through to the surface, wide and covered with hard, knobby scab-like growths with thick talons. Those claws seized the head of the coffin and almost effortlessly yanked the wood apart. They reached into the breached coffin and began to drag out the corpse within. A wide-eyed grimace of extreme terror was frozen on the pale face. The head lolled and rolled about loosely. The neck had been broken, snapped entirely through. The dead lunatic's body was drawn out of the coffin, down to the earthen floor, then sank into the loose soil. One shoe came off as the feet disappeared into the ground.

At the other coffin, the one that held the body of Count Dracula, the ground rippled and quaked, then cracked open. Two more clawed hands broke the surface, folded together like a diver's entering the water. Long lanky arms covered by rough black cloth followed. The hands slapped down to either side and pushed. A bulbous, knobby head with huge disk eyes and a writhing slit of a mouth popped up. The monster hauled its gnarled, hunchbacked body out of the earth, shaking itself to scatter loose dirt and pebbles about, and looked around to insure that there were no witnesses present. The thing shuffled to the coffin, pried up the lid with one hand, popping the nails that held it shut with little effort. It stooped down, rummaged around inside the coffin for a moment, then drew back holding a hugely ornate signet ring and a long black silken cape. It looked around once more, curiously, having never been above ground before, then dived back into the patch of loose earth from which it had emerged. It wiggled and thrashed and disappeared in seconds.

The buckled earthen wakes churned once more, then collapsed. Other than a few soft patches of loosened dirt, there was no sign that anyone had entered the room.

The bottom of the freshly buried coffin was torn out, the contents removed, and the padded silk lining was left to hang down into the space below like the tattered wings of a violated moth. The shredded silk dangled from the apex of a cathedral-sized vault excavated beneath Highgate Cemetery. To the human eye, there was nothing but impenetrable blackness filling the void. To the eyes that watched, the walls shone with a crepuscular purple glow. A phosphorescent greenness dripped and slithered across bare stone and wisps of incandescent blue web drifted lazily on breezes that had nothing to do with the still and stagnant air.

The body descended on a strand of braided spider-silk. Its arms and legs swayed with each jerky drop downward. An infrasound humming filled the air, rumbled through the stone walls. It was the song of a choir of hunchbacked monsters that rocked back and forth, great disk eyes turned upon the corpse that was lowered among them. The gaunt corpse's mouth was open, as if in a silent, dead scream.

In time the body, gaunt and cold and dressed in fine formal wear, with a top hat set snuggly upon its head, was raised into a gnarled cradle of carved tree-root. Its arms were crossed over its chest and the lids of the unseeing eyes were peeled back. The silken cape of Dracula was draped over its shoulders.

The greater portion of Dracula's essence, his dark soul, resided not in the undying flesh of his body, but was housed in the ornate signet ring emblazoned with the Dracula crest, that he wore on his hand. The sorcerers of old long ago learned how to remove their "hearts," their mystic essence actually, from their bodies and hide it in objects, so that they could not be truly slain unless the object housing their soul was destroyed as well as their body. Count Dracula had studied sorcery and black magic for centuries. There was little in the way of arcane knowledge that he was not privy to.

The ring was why he could rise again and again, no matter how learned his enemies were in the lore of vampires, no matter how carefully they planned his destruction. No stake, no fire, no cursed ray of the sun could end his existence so long as his signet ring remained undamaged. His enemies never seemed to pay any attention to the ring once it appeared that they had achieved their goal of destroying him. They saw bare bleached bones or crumbling ashes, an outline of dust upon the ground, and paid no heed to the gleam of silver and carnelian among them. Inevitably, the stake would be removed, the ashes placed on his grave, the sun-scorched skeleton returned to his coffin, and he would return, fully restored and renewed. Because Count Dracula's heart truly resided in his ring and not in his chest.

The eldest and most sinister of the gathered monsters reverently set the great silver ring upon the corpse's finger, the ring bearing the Dracula crest without and the soul of the vampire within.

The soul of Dracula wiggled free from the signet ring and crawled painfully into the cold flesh of the corpse. It burrowed, infesting the dead thing like a black, vaporous maggot. It wormed through veins clogged with dried blood and eventually bubbled into the dead man's brain. There, much to its surprise, it found that it was not alone inside the corpse's skull. There was something else there, huddled in the darkness, a Presence that clung tenaciously to the cold-clots of brain. The dead man's ghost stubbornly lurked inside its old head, hissing and babbling to itself, defiantly resisting the spiritual currents striving to draw it into the Afterlife.

" _Who's there?"_ It snarled. " _there is someone here with me. Go away! This is mine."_

The instinct of Dracula's soul was to lash out angrily, to beat down the one that dared defy it. Smash it! Break it! Drive the impertinent ghost screaming from its own skull. But, the soul was weak now. It dared not squander its energies in senseless struggle.

There were other ways to get what it wanted.

The Dracula soul slithered, sly and seductive, through the empty spaces it found in the dead man's brain. It coiled around each clump of tissue, spreading like a stain. It avoided the angry buzz of the stubborn ghost until it anchored itself firmly. Then, purring like a great hungry cat, it brushed up against the ghost, quietly crowding it into the back of the skull.

"I am Dracula."

The words were simple, but the tone carried the depth of five hundred years of existence, the unquestionable authority of one who ruled in life and commanded in death.

"Who…are…you?"

The words were a challenge.

" _I am the one who held the whole of the great city of London in a grip of terror! I am the one they all feared. The one who filled their nightmares!"_

"Indeed?"

Dracula allowed a hint of admiration.

"And why should so many fear…you?"

" _I showed them their sin. Showed them how deep and hideous the stains of it were. I tried to make them clean, again. I tried to cut out the parts that made them evil, excise the roots of their sickness. But the flesh itself is wanton and resists even the cleansing of knife and cleaver."_

"For this, they feared you? They hated you?"

" _Yesss! The whores opened their legs and spread their sickness like a plague. I tried. I tried but they hounded me, they hunted me, they hemmed me in from every side. With their chalk and their newsprint and their whistles. How is a man to work with all that dirty flesh crowding in, all that yammering chatter and suspicion?"_

"And so they brought you low. How sad."

" _NO!"_

There was triumphant vindication in the laughter that followed.

" _They never found me! For all their scurrying and all their theorizing, they never even knew my name! I slipped past their cordons and their patrols. I passed right under their noses and they never suspected me. For all they know, I am with them still, waiting. Waiting to start my work again. They look out at the night and wonder if I am there, lying in wait for them. Oh, the sweet irony of it! My passing was by my own hand, at the hour of MY choosing. They will never know who I was or the entirety of what I've done. Hospitals! Hospitals are such fine places to do one's cutting, much better than the filthy streets, and no one expects every surgery to end well."_

"Impressive. But now you are so very little. Hiding here in the dark. Why do you cling so tightly to the mortal clay you once were? Surely now you can relax and enjoy the accolades of those who can appreciate your work!"

" _There is no place for the likes of me in Eternity. I know that. EVE saw to that. The whores have won after all. But they will never have me! I will not give them the satisfaction of hearing my screams in Hell!"_

"Ah. Hell. I might have known. How little you know of the real horrors awaiting Man after death has come."

Dracula could feel the anger inside the little ghost bubbling up. The righteous madmen were the worst. But they were also the easiest to tempt.

"What if there was a way to cheat Eternity? What if you never had to leave this body, to give up walking the Earth? That. That much I can give you. Join with me. Give over this soon to be rotting flesh to my care and we may _both_ live, forever."

" _There are so many whores left. Will we be able to go on punishing them?"_

Dracula answered his question by showing him.

The moan of their surrender. Heads turning to one side. Sweet white throats, pulsing with life. The teeth, the first bite, the crunch of broken vein, the burst of salty blood. The jolt as they felt the sharpness of the pain, the writhing when they felt… the other.

Sharp, hard teeth piercing soft, warm breast. Bearing down toward the heart beating beneath. The primal satisfaction of unholy suckling.

The sweetest spot, the inside of the thigh. Arteries buried deep, hard to reach—but the _gush_ —the pounding gush like spurts from a fireman's pump hose. Full and hot, flooding the throat nearly too fast to be swallowed. Delicious life to choke on. To gorge on. Filling the belly, and beyond, with hard, stolen heartbeats.

Ah, but so hard to reach. Buried deeper in flesh than teeth can puncture…

" _Use a scalpel!"_

"We understand each other so well."

Dracula could feel the heat of the other's hunger, roused red-hot, searing the mind like a bloody brand. He knew that hunger. He knew it could not be denied. Time to make his move.

"Do you want this?"

" _YES!"_

"Then let go, join with me and together we will feed."

The buzzing, stubborn ghost let go, opened wide to embrace all that Dracula offered, and the Dracula soul swallowed him whole. The last stubborn ember was snuffed out in a flood of darkness.

The corpse, the _body_ , was his and his alone now.

Dracula opened his new eyes.

He was taller now, thinner. He was gaunt and lean with long hard limbs and a tight, wiry torso rather than the plump, gorged with stolen blood form that was naturally his. This body was like a long, leather wineskin, parched and empty, waiting to be filled. Dracula raised slender, still half numb fingers to his face. Prominent cheekbones, hollow cheeks, hawk-like nose, a sharp slash of a mouth. A moustache! His son Radu would be amused. They had argued long nights about the properness of facial hair.

He would leave it, as a gift to his thick and somewhat stubborn son, whose coarseness came, no doubt, from his peasant mother.

Dracula tried to rise from the root-cradle, but though the limbs answered his command, he was weak with hunger. There was no life in this stolen body. His will alone could barely move the dead clay.

The Underdwellers anticipated his need. Two of the hunchbacked brutes dragged forth a naked white female. Young, healthy, and strong, she had a wild shock of colorless hair, teeth filed sharp and not even sockets for eyes, only smooth skin over the faintest of indentations where eyes should have been. The Mole things had trapped her in the deepest sewers under London, where her cannibal clan had lived for centuries. She hissed and spat, struggling ferociously against her captors. She'd already killed two of them.

The Mole creatures dragged her to Dracula's side, seized her hair in knobby fists and stretched her neck over his open mouth. A blunt talon hard enough to chip through stone punched into her throat, puncturing the artery and opening a red hole that spewed blood in shuddering gouts. They forced her head down until Dracula's lips could fasten over the neck wound. Fangs sprouted, shoving aside blunter human teeth and anchored into her chalk white skin. The female cannibal thrashed and kicked, toes clawing at the smooth root-wood for purchase. Then, the struggles subsided. Legs and arms quivered, jerking as Dracula sucked down great gulps of red blood. In the end, her pelvis was grinding against the wood of the cradle. There came deep moans as her body spasmed orgasmically through the last of her death throes. The last shudder was of release as well as a death rattle.

Dracula was sated.

He rose nimbly from the cradle and glared about with fiery red eyes. The Mole creatures swayed and bowed, tossing their arms from side to side. The rocks vibrated with the intensity of their inaudible chants. Dracula spread his arms, holding the sorcerous cape out to either side, His whole body darkened to an inky blackness then melted into the shape of a gigantic bat. The magic woven into the cape would supplement his own supernatural shape-changing powers until he grew more fully into this new body. With a piercing ultrasound screech, he beat his wings and began the long journey home.

Dracula swooped across the mouth of the long, wide tunnel that sloped beneath the Channel and toward the Continent beyond. His elongated bat ears heard the crash of surf above and the churning, gurgling sounds of what lie within the tunnel. He paused, drawn by the longing, the stinging _need_ for his native soil, which lie far away, beyond the vast tunnel ahead of him. But there was one small thing he had to attend to first. A seed that must be planted against some future need. He wheeled about, tucking then extending leathery wings in a graceful aerial pirouette.

"Poor Renfield. You should have known better than to betray me."

The dead lunatic was sprawled at Dracula's feet, his wide staring eyes aimed unerringly at the face of his Master. The grimace of terror on his lips was, if anything, wider and wilder, stretched as the dead skin dried.

"You let _Her_ crawl into your heart, when you should have kept it full of flies and spiders. Love is death for such as you. You knew that. Poor foolish Renfield."

Dracula spread a long-fingered hand over Renfield's body. His lips moved as he whispered Words that were ancient when the Egypt of the Pharaohs' had been born. His fingers writhed, like the hand of a puppeteer gathering up his strings. The body on the ground twitched. The legs jerked. A hand shot up, then fell on its chest. A shudder ran through the lunatic's body as it began to breath once more. The look of terror on his dead face curdled into one of profound sorrow.

Dracula wrenched his hand upward, curling it into a fist.

Renfield shuddered, let out a terrified gurgle, then climbed unsteadily to his feet. He stood there, swaying, with his head rolling from side to side across his chest. He grabbed his own hair with one hand and pulled his head upright. He held his head up by the hair, since his broken neck could no longer support it. With a twist of his wrist, he swung his face back and forth, trying to look around him.

Despite the utter blackness of the cavern, his dead eyes were beginning to make out shapes, gray and mauve, tinged with a ghastly luminferous green. When he swung his head toward Dracula, he staggered backwards and made a rattling shriek.

"The Blood is the Life, Renfield. Even the blood of those little lives you consumed. Did I not tell you it would be so?"

Renfield stumbled to his knees, shaking his head back and forth with his hand.

"The living do not need the lives of the things they eat to sustain themselves. Dead meat can feed the Living. Why do you think you were driven to eat things with the life still in them? It was so those lives would sustain you after your mortal existence ended. The Dead must feed on Life, Renfield."

Dracula regarded his resurrected slave with critical eyes.

"It is a pity that you fed only on such tiny, pitiable creatures. You would be far more useful to me with at least the lives of some plump rats or dogs in you."

He sighed, frowned.

Renfield stumbled back to his feet, a look of idiot dread on his face.

"But, I have need of a servant, and the likes of you will have to suffice. Come, I have instructions for you, instructions that you are to carry out to the letter. All the suffering you have known till now will be like a pleasant dream compared to what I will do to you if you fail me one more time."

There are dark worlds beneath the Earth, endless tunnels, vast caverns, black gulfs, bottomless chasms, a sunless realm of mystery unimaginable to sane men. Through this winding subterranean maze of secret ways Dracula would journey. The aching need for his native soil drove him. Night and day had no meaning here. The sun's rays had never touched the world beneath stone skies. But, though Dracula had no need to lapse into the death-like slumber with the rise of an unseen sun, he still felt the yearning for his own grave. Without his grave soil to rest in, a creeping fatigue grew inside him. Without rest, he could feel the death that he defied with his existence. A sheen covered his skin beneath the black hair of the bat he wore. It was not sweat from exertion, though his wings beat in frantic, endless strokes. It was the sticky dew of putrescence seeping out of his pores. He could feel rot growing within him, slowly, but inexorably. It itched beneath his skin, behind his eyes. It oozed from his nose and from his fanged mouth to fall upon the stones below in greasy drops.

He returned to the vast, yawning mouth of the tunnel under the Channel. The churning noises within sounded so terribly like _slurping_. With a defiant shriek at whatever horrors he might find, Dracula folded his leathery wings and plunged into the blackness.

He soared, flapping, head swiveling to scan for danger. He passed downward through a long, deep hole, emerging at last into a vast round tunnel. Phosphorescent white fireballs of swamp gas rolled against the curved roof, with dripped with brine from the sea above. The fireballs bobbed and tumbled across smooth-worn stone, bouncing in slow motion, cold white stars trapped in the skin of the earth. Below him, a river of living mud, a churning, surging tide of ooze a mile deep, followed his progress with silent, hungry waves. The sharp bones of animals forgotten before man existed tumbled to the surface, struggled to escape, but always sank once more.

Through chalk tubes and holes bored through solid granite by some unknowable force, Dracula flew beneath France. He rose with the icy currents of subterranean air, flying upward into deep galleries of forgotten catacombs with their walls of stacked bones and grottos full of grinning skulls. Once, he swerved from his path to investigate the sounds of music reverberating in the deep and found himself locked in an unwanted conflict with another denizen of the dark underworld. In sub-sub-basements beneath the Opera House he contested with a masked Ghost for the throat that uttered a song so heart-breakingly beautiful that it drew him away from the pull of his homeland. The dark Opera Ghost, skilled in arts of necromancy as well as music, spoke Words that even such as Dracula could not deny, and so the vampire was forced to flee. But not before he tasted the blood from that lovely white throat, not before he drank the song in the blood of the singer, an aria he would long remember.

That is a tale for another night.

He passed buried temples where naked white witches dance, unaware that the Dark Ages ended long ago. Eyeless, hairless, their toothless mouths gumming empty air, they spat vile chants into the darkness, and the Darkness chuckled with amusement.

He flew above sunken grottos where where glass-skinned things that might have once been men capered grotesquely. Their inner organs jiggled inside transparent bodies as they pranced about.

There was an underground sea of crystalline water whose glassine surface had never known ripples, let alone waves. Something _Ancient_ beyond knowing slept at the bottom of that sea and the earth itself held its breath let the Sleeper be stirred to restlessness.

In a forest of giant mushrooms, black furry beasts the size of wolves ran snapping and shrieking. They were descended from bats but long ago shed their wings and grew legs again. They raced beneath him, shrieking curious howls, sensing his kindred nature, excited by the smell of death.

The Mole Creatures swarmed throughout the underground world. It was _their_ world. Long black columns of them marched through winding tunnels. They chipped and dug at rock faces everywhere, patiently adding new galleries to the subterranean labyrinth, opening new vaults full of shunned secrets.

They tended vast orchards of fungal trees, harvested bloated white puffballs from fields of black sand.

Dracula travelled through a wide, flat wasteland where the ceiling was so low he was forced to shed wings and drop down to run on wolf's paws, sometimes with stones brushing his back, sometimes squeezing on his belly through cracks miles long. The low ceiling was, here and there, pockmarked with square holes. Shredded silk cushions and torn shrouds hung down like tattered drapes everywhere. The ground was thick with cracked bone and rotted flesh. Among this charnel debris the Mole-Things' livestock rooted and fed. They were plump, armored rat-things with sightless black pellet eyes and endlessly questing snouts. They shared a common ancestor with the armadillo, but theirs had ventured far too deep into the earth and had grown fiercely voracious. They were meat-eaters and their snouts were full of razor-sharp teeth. The Mole Things feed them on grave fodder, excavated from below, and the armored rats developed an insatiable hunger for human meat. Dracula knew them well. He kept a score of the ferocious man-eaters scurrying around in the crypts beneath his castle. To discourage visitors.

The sight of them told him that he was nearing his homeland.

When the ground unexpectedly fell away into unknown depths, Dracula's furry wolf body leaped, flattening out into a wide, winged bat form once more. The change should have been seamless, effortless, but he was still weaker in his stolen body. He fell a considerable distance before he could will his form into the desired shape. A bat's tongue chattered squeaking curses as he resumed his wobbily flight.

In the woods, several miles from Whitby, under a full moon with the fiddles and pipes of a Tinker tribe playing softly in the distance, several men pondered a mysterious find.

"Wot you think 'appened 'ere?"

"Looks like somebody got all burnt up."

"Out 'ere, in the middle o' the woods?"

"'Ats wot it looks like."

The blackened skeleton on the ground was curled and twisted, as if it had writhed against the flames that consumed it. The arms were doubled up and the hands were clenched in fists.

"Sure looks like 'e was mad as 'ell about somethin'."

"Most likely, bein' all burnt up."

The Tinkers grunted and shuffled about.

The skeleton's skull was blackened, encrusted with ash and carbonized flesh, but the teeth were pearly white. There was something wrong about them. They were too long, too sharp. The superstitious men wanted nothing to do with it. None of them would look the skull in the face and several spit and warded off the Evil Eye.

"Wot're we gonna do wit 'im?"

"Maybe like we should tell the Coppers 'bout 'im. Let 'em figure out wot to do."

There was a general murmur of discontent. The Tinkers never liked talking to Coppers unless it was deadly necessary. Odds were that the police would decide that _they_ had something to do with the body and its current incinerated state.

"Maybe we ought'er bury 'im."

" _Don't you touch him!"_ shouted a voice from the dark woods nearby.

There was shuffling and some thrashing about in the brush, and then a small, wiry man in a white shirt, with suspenders and dark pants, came stumbling toward them. He was grinning wildly and wore just one shoe. For some reason, he had an arm crooked up over his head clutching a handful of his own hair.

The Tinkers shied back from him. The man was filthy, covered with dirt from head to foot and he smelled like an open grave.

"Don't you touch him!" He hissed again, stalking nearer.

" 'Ere now! Who're you to be givin' orders to the likes of us, eh?"

The men began to rally, grumbling amongst themselves and glaring at the weird little man in an increasingly surly manner.

"Me? Me?" Laughed the little man, as if at a crude joke. "Why, I'm just a little spider. I'm a little fly stuck in a web."

He shuffled even nearer. There was something disturbing about the way his head swung and bobbed as he moved.

"I'm not the one you should worry about. _They_ are!"

The lunatic gestured melodramatically at the ground underfoot.

The earth heaved and began to churn. It looked as if the soil itself was boiling. Two black shapes, hunch-backed with terrible claws and unblinking eyes that shone red in the moonlight rose slowly from the ground. They made no audible sound at all, but every man present could feel their growling like a rumbling in the guts.

Most of the Tinkers fled immediately. A few were too paralyzed with fear to move.

One man fell to the ground. His hand landed on something hard. A Cross! It was a Cross made of hawthorn wood bound together with silk thread. The man clutched the Cross and staggered to his feet, brandishing it like a weapon.

The dark monsters that rose from the ground did not move. They just continued to stare and make their gut-churning growl.

The lunatic knelt by the skeleton, whispering something.

"The Power O' Christ!" Shouted the brave Tinker.

The lunatic twisted his arm and his head rotated around to stare backward over his shoulders. His neck was twisted like a huge rubber band.

"Heee! Heee! Heee!"

The Tinker dropped his Cross and ran, stumbling, after the others.

"Help me carry him." The lunatic commanded, gesturing with his free arm.

"We must find somewhere dark for him. Someplace where no one will find him. Where we can hide him until the Master returns."

The monsters ducked their heads and stooped to obey.

Dracula passed through underground kingdoms of the Dead. There were black vaults with stalactite fanged ceilings where ghosts howled. Some were invisible, wearing tattered shrouds with eyeholes chewed through the cloth. Some were transparent gelid skeletons floating on icy breezes, festooned with the webs of blind spiders.

Armies of rattling skeletons marched clattering in the deeps. Brainless, breathless, empty-skulled they were driven by ancient commands uttered forgotten ages ago. They pushed graven stones about, building elaborate configurations on the scarred stone ground. The patterns of the stones they arranged changed, shifted, slowly writhed in never-ending permutations as the skeletons sought to build a monolithic design from a pattern now nothing but a dusty memory rattling like a pebble in their skulls. The purpose of this ceaseless effort was long forgotten. The skeletons arranged and shifted the stones, awaiting some approval, some command to stop that would never come.

Dracula flew over them giving them no more heed than they gave to him.

The buzzing ahead warned him. It grew to a terrible deep, rumbling drone.

Dracula pulled his substance in, dragging the vast wings tighter, forcing his stubborn new flesh to compact until he was a normal sized bat. His whole body felt like an overfull bladder about to burst. Not for the first time he was grateful for the magics woven into his cape for the way they kept his form malleable, half-shadow in whatever shape he chose to wear.

Tiny and furry, silent and wholly unobserved, Dracula clung to the rocky ceiling of the cavern and crept slowly along. Beneath him was one of the Bone Cathedrals of the Corpse-Wasps. Corpse-Wasps were horrid things, not entirely of Earthly origin, that sometimes fell from the darkness between stars on a moonless night. Unable to survive on Earth in their native form, a strangely beautiful shape that suggested both the insect and coral polyps pulsing with unimaginable colors only the Dead could see, they sought out human hosts. They crept into the bedrooms of sleeping humans and buried their stingers deep into the bellies of their victims. They pumped all of their essence into the host until their original bodies turned clear as glass and wispy as spun sugar. The first stray breeze would blow them to dust and away.

Once inside a person, they waited. All through the long normal life of a human they lurked as nothing more than the occasional disturbing, incomprehensible nightmare. However, once the host died, once they had been safely buried, the Corpse-Wasp chewed its way free and began its new life. They were three to four feet long when they crawled out of a belly, and they would grow another couple of feet as they devoured the husk of the corpse they left behind.

Wingless and covered with a thick armored shell, with huge blood-red skull-shaped head, the Corpse-Wasp would burrow into the earth to seek its own kind.

The most horrible part of the horrible metamorphosis was that they took the mind and captured soul of their victim with them, as helpless passengers inside a monstrous body, subject to the whims of an alien mind. The human minds almost all went mad in short order.

But not always. Dracula actually kept one of the things, which had once been a particularly troublesome monk, as a sort of pet among the other grotesqueries in the crypts under his castle. The way it rasped out the prayers of the Rosary as it shuffled about amused him.

In their own caverns, the Corpse-Wasps gathered and made strange porcelain-white nests. They chewed up human bones and spun the resulting paste into the most amazing shapes. Long fluted columns with ruffled edges and hexagonal chambers, they rose like pipe organs from hidden grottos. There they spent the centuries, huddled together, rasping and droning their alien songs. They awaited some vast cosmic signal, some permutation of the stars that would call them to rise, rise and destroy and return again to the dark places between the stars.

Corpse-Wasps were dreadful things. They ate any flesh they encountered. Every noise other than the ones they made themselves drove them to hissing frenzies. The dark shamblers that he called to his service, the hunch-backed burrowing Mole People, fought terrible wars against the nests of Corpse-Wasps whenever they stumbled onto one.

Dracula made careful note of the location of this new nest, to pass on to his allies when the time was right. Then he crawled as quickly and as quietly as he could away from that buzzing cavern of horrors.

Deep in the earth, beneath the roots of the mountain upon which Castle Dracula stands, there is a special Hell, a Hell reserved only for vampires. It is called the Vault of Hunger. None who go there ever return. Except for one.

Dracula fluttered to a halt before the great inscribed stone wheel that sealed the passage ahead. He spread his black wings and melted like poured ink back into his human form. He ran a long-fingered hand across the stone of the wheel, to test the wards. Hieroglyphs and sigils carved into the stone flared an angry red at his merest touch. Searing stone-fire, hot as lava, burned as the engraved symbols writhed as if alive.

"The wards still hold. Good. Have them roll back the stone, just a hands width and no farther."

The elder Mole Creature bowed. It raised its twisted arms and grunted instructions. A dozen of the shambling monsters threw themselves against the edge of the stone and began to push. The sigils in the stone did not flare at their touch. The magics of the wheel were tuned solely toward the Undead. With a terrible bone-jarring grinding noise, the stone wheel lurched, then rolled almost imperceptibly to one side. A slight aperture opened a crescent slice no wider than a palm.

"Enough!" Shouted Dracula. There was a hint of dread in even his voice.

An ice-cold breeze gusted out of the open crescent. The air from the Vault was foul, thick with the stench of rotted meat and old death, the tang of curdled blood, the rank filthy smell of hundreds of unwashed bodies. Immediately a deafening chorus of howls and screams issued from the aperture. Bone white fingers thin as twigs scrabbled at the tiny opening, even as the smoke of burning flesh began to bubble out on the breeze.

Dracula gathered himself, steeled his inhuman will for what was to come. He wrapped the black silk cape tightly around his shoulders and closed his eyes to concentrate. He was not sure that he was strong enough inside this new flesh to accomplish the feat he was about to attempt.

A ripple passed over his features. A haziness began to envelope his body. It seemed as if his entire form was beginning to blur, to go out of focus. Mist began to seep from his pores. His flesh became soft like melting wax. His whole form trembled as he concentrated. His brow furrowed and he ground his fanged teeth together in fierce determination. Then, finally, with an audible hiss, his entire body collapsed into a thick cloud of fog.

Moving swiftly, he knew not how long he could hold this shape, Dracula flowed through the small crack the Mole Creatures had opened. Almost immediately the eldest hooted a command and the stone wheel was shoved back into place.

Count Dracula entered the Vault of Hunger, alone.

Vampirism is a contagion, a soul sickness passed from victim to victim like a fever in the blood. Not all vampires had the powers or the clarity of will shown by Dracula and his Chosen. Those with whom he shared his blood, or who inherited it by birth, were vastly stronger than those spawned by infection alone. Not every person bitten by a vampire was doomed to become one. Those killed by a master vampire like Dracula or his Brides or his Brood, often rose as vampires themselves, but not always. Sometimes the defiled body would lie quietly in its grave for years before the evil inside it ripened enough to stir it to motion. Those who were bitten but survived could live out their remaining years with barely any sign of the corruption that festered within them, only to emerge as blood-drinking ghouls soon after their burial.

Every vampire needs to feed and every victim spreads the curse. Left unchecked the scourge of vampirism would have long ago depopulated Transylvania and the lands around it. But the plague of vampires was held in check, not by the Church or by self-appointed vampire-hunters, but by the iron fist of Dracula himself. Those touched by his evil, whenever left undestroyed by their families, were gathered up, trapped in the night or ripped from their graves.

Some, those who had not incurred Dracula's wrath in any way, were summarily destroyed by fire and by sunlight, by stake and by decapitation. The others were cast into the darkest pits under Castle Dracula, condemned to starve for eternity in the Vault of Hunger.

The Vault was a vast black bubble inside the skin of the Earth, an ancient magma chamber that collapsed and drained back into the depths. Its curved walls were of basalt, spires of glossy obsidian rose like teeth from a floor of pumice and ash. To the unearthly eyes of the Undead, the walls glowed green, the spires flickered with yellow flashes like fire. The ground was a cold blue turning mauve. The entire space of the vault was filled with squirming white figures, the naked, starving larvae spawned by hundreds of vampires feeding for hundreds of years. They crawled and squirmed and wiggled over one another forming heaps of thrashing bodies. Driven mindlessly mad by the torment of their thirst, they gnawed at their own flesh searching for nonexistent drops of blood. They bit each other and sucked ferociously at each other's empty veins, seeking some ease to their suffering. Piles of struggling, snarling, bodies rolled across the floor of the vault, caked with ash, sloshing from wall to wall like slow-moving screaming waves.

Above the wiggling white masses, clouds of rabid bats spiraled about in constant seething motion, chasing each other in endless futile dogfights. The screeching of the bats and the screaming wailing din of the damned filled the Vault with a deafening cacophony that would have burst the eardrums of any mortal listeners.

But for an instant, the Vault fell silent. All motion stopped as every blood-crazed eye turned in one direction.

Alone he stood, arms extended, holding the edges of his cape, top hat set slightly askew on his head. Taller and lankier than any remembered him, but undeniably Count Dracula, the source of all their suffering.

Hatred, raw and boiling, rose like a cloud around him. The fire of it actually filled the vault with a visible red haze, like a burning fog.

As one, the thousands of starved vampires surged forward, fangs extended, claws raised, madness blazing in their eyes.

And, with a single raised hand, Dracula stopped them all dead in their tracks.

With another gesture of his arm, he opened a path through their ranks. Calmly he sauntered through the mob. They quivered with suppressed rage, desperate to lash out but frozen in place by his will. Dracula crossed the Vault and came at last to a small door of oak and iron set into a recess carved into the wall. The wood was worn, stained black with old blood, and it was deeply scored with sigils and crisscrossing rows of runes. Dracula placed his hand upon one rune and pressed. There was a click and a plug of wood fell inward. A hole opened in the door, no more than a couple of inches across, a wormhole burrowed all the way through the six-inch thick slab of oak that the door was made from. Once more Dracula marshalled his will. Prickling on the back of his neck and scalp told him that every eye in the Vault was upon him, every one searching for a sign of weakness, for some flaw in the wall of willpower that held them at bay. Once more, he wrapped the cape around him and once more, he melted into mist. Quickly he flowed through the hole in the door and spilled out upon familiar stone steps on the other side.

The cacophonous roar rose again in the Vault behind him. Desperate fingers scrabbled at the hole. Dracula congealed back into solid form, lifted the sigil-covered plug of wood and carefully, inexorably shoved it back into place, once more blocking out the sounds of the madness beyond.

A murmured incantation and a wave of his hand and the opening was sealed and locked.

Dracula ascended the steps that led up to the lowest levels of the crypts beneath Castle Dracula. He was home once again. Home at last.

The wooden arrow that pierced her heart held Marya Zaleska in a death-like trance, pinned where she fell. A stake through the heart cannot kill a vampire, at least not one as powerful as a blood-daughter of Count Dracula himself. But it does rob them of the ability to move, traps them inside their mortal shell. For Countess Zaleska, this was not a numb or painless experience. She felt the arrow inside her heart, like a stitch in the side, a sharp pain that never lets up. The rest of her body was not quite numb, but ached on the verge of numbness. It felt as if she were holding her breath, unable to take another or release the last one she drew in. She felt like a balloon about to burst, but there was no end of these sensations in sight. She would remain like this until the arrow was removed, whether it was in hours, days, years, or even centuries. She felt madness clawing at the inside of her eyelids. She felt madness and a bitter hatred toward Sandor for betraying her boiled inside her punctured heart.

If Sandor thought that death would release him, that he would escape punishment for his betrayal, he was wrong. He had tasted her blood, licked it from her breast, from wounds gouged with her own fingernails. She was inside him. In death as in life, Sandor belonged to her!

As long as her blood remained inside his body, there were ways to call him back to face her wrath.

Release, when it came, was as sharp and unexpected as the original impalement. A long-fingered hand planted itself on her breast, pressed down hard for leverage. Another seized the fletched end of the arrow and ripped it out. The jagged arrowhead tore loose a meaty chunk of her heart as it was yanked free. The pain was indescribable. It was exquisite in its intensity. Life flowed back into her body, bringing with it the unavoidable tingling pain of renewed circulation. The last breath she had drawn whooshed out of her lungs in a guttural cry of pleasure. Gathering her strength, her will, she opened her eyes to see who her savior, and likely next meal, could be.

Marya Zaleska did not recognize the face that leaned over her. The gaunt cheeks, hawk-like nose, piercing eyes and thin-lipped mouth were all new to her. The moustache! A thin pencil-like line of hair along the upper lip, it looked both ridiculous and sexy at the same time.

Zaleska stretched, squirming sensually, like a predatory cat waking up and contemplating its first meal of the day.

The face over her smiled indulgently.

"Welcome back, my dear little one."

There was something about that voice. No, not the voice itself, she decided, that was a deep baritone she had never heard before. But there was something familiar in the tone, in the wording.

"I was worried when you were not present to greet me when I returned to the castle. I was fortunate to find you before the sun did. If you thought the stake was painful, you cannot imagine what the touch of the sun would feel like. It is like being on fire, forever."

Oh, no. Zaleska thought. It cannot be!

The face and the voice were unfamiliar, even the absurd top hat, but not the cape, not the great signet ring with the Dracula Crest upon his finger. It could not be! He was dead! He was _destroyed_! She had finally won free of him.

Countess Zaleska started to bolt upright, to leap out of the coffin she found herself in, but the hand on her breast effortlessly held her down.

"There is nothing to fear now, though. Hush, my dear little one. Daddy is home."

With a cruel smile, Dracula forced his daughter back down, slammed the coffin lid, and wrapped chains around it several times before locking them tightly.

He took a moment to savor the screams of terror and the pounding from inside the coffin.

A disobedient child must be punished. His daughter had tried to destroy him. Dracula imagined that a few years bound in darkness, starving and suffocating, would show her the error of her ways.

A pity that his efforts to move to England had not gone as planned. Transylvania was a dry, dying land. He and his kind had long ago sucked the vitality out of it, leaving both the land and the blood of the people thin and bitter and bland. He needed a new land from which to feed, a new people to quench his thirsts.

His son Radu always went on about how the Americas were a "rich and vibrant" land, filled with a "young and virile race." Perhaps Radu had been right about more than just the moustache. Perhaps he would try going there to feed. Perhaps…


End file.
